'Call Of Duty: Ghosts' And The Big Business Of Activision's Flagship Shooter Franchise

Call of Duty: Ghosts faces unique challenges with a hardware transition and a new story. Can Activision's best-selling shooter defend its status as the number one video game?

Call of Duty: Ghosts Studio Lead, Mark Rubin, isn't quite sure how to describe the millions of fans who play Call of Duty games.

At first he tells me that they're "casual" gamers, but then stops himself. That's not quite right. Call of Duty, he says, falls into a different marketplace than other games, and targets a different demographic.

These are people who spend three hours a day playing just one game, often spending more hours with that game in a week than "core" gamers.

Still, they're not quite the "core" demographic either. They don't spend much time on forums or social media talking about games. They're not reading IGN or Game Informer. "We need a different category to describe them," Rubin tells me.

The only word I can come up with is "monogamous."

Millions of gamers every year head to GameStop and Wal*Mart to buy just one game: whatever the new annual release is in the Call of Duty franchise.

Some prefer the Black Ops label, while others prefer Modern Warfare, but Rubin says that most fans go for both. That's good for Activision, since Ghosts has neither label attached to it.

The time Call of Duty fans spend with their game of choice has continued to rise over the years.

With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Rubin says gamers were playing 60 - 70 minutes per session.

Today, the average time spent with the game is about double, clocking in at 120 minutes per session.

What this means to me is that a lot of players are spending unhealthy amounts of time honing their shooting skills and pwning noobs. Like your humble narrator.

This is why I have such a hard time competing in Call of Duty multiplayer, even though I've played entries in the series since it was primarily all about World War II.

As a game critic (and a husband, and a father) I can't afford to spend that kind of time on any one game. I can't keep up with the pros, with the guys who spend three or four hours a day learning every nook and cranny of each and every map.

(I've noticed a similar phenomenon with online games such as Dota 2 and League of Legends, which attract almost cult-like followings who play little else and become inordinately skillful, to the dismay of beginners. The only difference is that I feel much more at home in a first-person shooter, where reflexes and skill feel more intuitive than damage-per-second management.)

Infinity Ward's Mark Rubin

Delivering the Goods

Another word I might use to describe Call of Duty fans is "loyal."

They keep coming back every year. They buy map packs and DLC. And you very rarely see a huge outcry or backlash from the Call of Duty community the way we've seen with some other games like Mass Effect 3 or Diablo III or SimCity 5.

It's a two-way street, of course. The fans may be loyal, but there's a reason for that. The games are consistent and players always know basically what they're getting into.

In an industry filled with disappointing sequels, Call of Duty usually delivers. It may not be a game that appeals to many "core" gamers, but that's irrelevant. It appeals to the people who buy it each year, and the developers are careful not to break the formula.

Infinity Ward hasn't avoided controversy, of course. When Activision fired the co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella, they took nearly half the team with them and went on to found Respawn Games, an independent studio working with EA on the upcoming Titanfall shooter. Rebuilding the studio was a challenge, and came amidst a flurry of lawsuits between Activision and the former employees.

Then, in 2012, Infinity Ward Creative Strategist, Robert Bowling, left the studio.

But the lawsuits, bad blood, resignations and various accusations of wrongdoing didn't halt development on Modern Warfare 3. Now the developer has a new studio and a 125-employee team.

I ask Rubin how Infinity Ward strikes a balance between innovation and delivering the game consumers have come to expect. He sighs at this. It's a question he gets often, and he's used to seeing criticism about the game's lack of innovation online.

He admits it's tough, especially with a yearly release cycle.

"Trying to improve and introduce new designs without messing up the formula is extremely difficult," he says. "There's no magic formula."

But there is a formula, and so far---if sales data is any proof---it must have a hint of magic to it.

Rubin says they start with two pretty basic core pillars---gameplay and fun---and then start iterating.

They add new mechanics and new ideas but are willing "to cut things or trim stuff or take features out if they don’t work." Big ideas get whittled down.

In a sense, Activision's conservative approach to business is reflected in the games, and that means that loyal fans keep getting the game they expect, while critics and the "core" gamer demographic dismiss the games as big-budget retreads.

Rubin says much of the franchise's success is its ability to bring "a movie like experience to video games."

It's more cinematic and less "gamey" and this, according to Rubin, makes it easier for a broad audience to relate to. It's precisely because the game feels less like a game and more like a movie that this new demographic has emerged.

In other words, most of my biggest complaints about the single-player Call of Duty campaign are the exact things that make the game so successful in the first place.

Fiddling With the Dials

As a critic, I find the Call of Duty games among the hardest to review.

On the one hand, I've been a harsh critic of the single-player campaigns. They're too cinematic, too filled with changing equations and quick-time events. Big, beautiful environments mask a narrow corridor.

These great set-pieces leave little room for exploration. We follow a straight line through each level, often in stark contrast to the free-roaming found in multi-player. Even with plenty of varied environments and missions, you still feel like you're playing in a funnel, headed toward the inevitable with little room to maneuver.

A part of me feels like this massive budget is wasted on a corridor shooter. I want that same sense of openness and freedom that the first Crysis had, or the marvelous open-world of Far Cry 3.

So, on the one hand I look at Call of Duty and think: "They need to take more risks."

On the other hand, I can't help but admire the franchise's commitment to its fans. They may not push the needle too far with each release, but as the saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I may want a more open-world style game, but that doesn't mean the millions of people buying the game each year want that. And to their credit, Activision has been enormously consistent from one release to the next, giving their loyal fans exactly what they want.

Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg

I spoke recently with Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, and asked him why the publisher's other top-selling annual release, Skylanders, seems to innovate more with each new title than what we see in Call of Duty year after year.

Not surprisingly, Hirshberg disagrees with the premise of the question. I get the feeling he's been asked similar questions in the past.

"If the innovations are seen as too iterative the question is, is it innovative enough," Hirshberg tells me. "And if the innovations are more dramatic in nature, the question becomes this one, which is are the innovations too dramatic, are you going to make your loyal fan-base uncomfortable?

"I actually think the answer is the same on both franchises. I think that what the Call of Duty developers have done better than anyone is strike the balance between delivering the game that people fell in love with and delivering new reasons to want to play it and want to try it every year.

"Our willingness to let the developers kind of fiddle with the dials and try things like branching storylines which Treyarch tried first time last year in the franchise or dynamic events in maps in multiplayer like Infinity Ward is trying this time. Those are pretty fundamental shifts that live within an overall framework of the Call of Duty game people have come to know and love. And I would say we've done the exact same thing with Skylanders Swap Force."

Fiddling with the dials is probably a good way to think about it.

When I reviewed the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 2 last year, I noted that "Black Ops 2 [multiplayer] tightens up, expands upon, and improves on [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3] in just about every way, and even though the changes aren’t revolutionary, the package as a whole feels like a much more complete experience."

And it's true: the changes weren't revolutionary, but they were noticeable.

You could create your own class for the first time, and character and loadout customization options were deeper and more interesting. A new "Score Streak" replaced the old "Kill Streak" which I thought was a useful way to add balance to the leaderboards and encourage teamwork. The maps were better, too, though not in a way you'd notice right off the bat.

Ultimately, the changes between the two multiplayer games were never so drastic that you'd feel out of place moving from one to the next. And that's exactly the point.

The Very Big Business of 'Call of Duty'

Call of Duty: Ghosts has a lot to live up to when it launches later this year on current and next-generation video game consoles.

Activision's flagship first-person shooter has consistently topped sales charts since Modern Warfare came out in 2007.

Abandoning the World War II setting, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare launched at the dawn of a new generation of consoles. It was a major departure from the series' roots, and it sold more units than any in the entry had before.

Released in November of 2007, Modern Warfare had sold over 10 million units by June of the following year.

The game launched the same month as Ubisoft's first Assassin's Creed, Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy, and BioWare's original Mass Effect---at the time an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Infinity Ward's shooter topped them all, selling just over 2 million units in its first month. In fact, the Xbox 360 version, at 1.57 million units, was the number one selling title of November even without the additional 444,000 PS3 units sold.

And this was just the beginning.

Modern Warfare 2 sold even more copies than its predecessor, and the first Call of Duty: Black Ops topped 8.4 million units in November of 2010, making it the seventh best-selling game in history.

"Call of Duty’s success is rooted from being the right game, by the right developer, with the right publisher, launched at the right time," EEDAR's Jesse Divnich tells me.

"Every entertainment vertical has its juggernaut brands. Music has its Madonna and U2; movies has its Star Wars; and video games has its Call of Duty. It’s just one of those games that has struck a chord with the gaming community, and now that we are hooked, we keep coming back for more."

Still, the higher they come, the harder they fall. And the bigger the target.

By the time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 came out in 2011 there was already talk of the franchise's apparent decline. The game sold 6.5 million units on its first day, making it the fastest selling game in the history of the industry.

Black Ops 2 launched the next year, moving 7.5 million units in its first 24 hours, once again breaking records for the franchise and for the video game industry.

Even so, some analysts started calling it a day.

“Call of Duty, I’m calling it a failure,” Wedbush analysts Michael Pachter said at the time, noting that $60 a year for Call of Duty was nowhere near as profitable as the $180 a year World of Warcraft players were spending.

"This multiplayer thing being free was a mistake," Pachter said. "I don't think anybody ever envisioned it would be this big. It's a mistake because it keeps those people from buying and playing other games."

Here we come back to the question---or perhaps anomaly---of this loyal-and-monogamous demographic. Changing the Call of Duty business model could be just as risky as changing the nature of the games themselves.

If Activision began charging extra for multiplayer or, on the flip-side, transitioned to a free-to-play model, the publisher would risk undermining the very audience they've spent years cultivating.

I ask Rubin if there's ever any discussion of moving toward free-to-play, especially now that Call of Duty: Online will be a free-to-play game in China.

"Purely from a developer standpoint that’s a scary road to go down," he tells me.

Free-to-play "introduces a different design mechanic," Rubin says. One that's "geared toward multiplayer, microtransactions, constant content updates, that often lead to basically how do we up each content release? How do we make each content release better and better and better?"

That's a scary proposition to Rubin, both because it changes how a game is built and played and because it sounds exhausting. Pretty soon all your energy is spent trying to supply new content rather than focusing on the next game.

Worse still, micro-transactions and the free-to-play model could disrupt the level playing field loyal consumers have come to expect. There's a risk that transitioning to a micro-transaction model could turn off gamers who feel like their time spent honing their skill is cheapened by the ability to simply buy your way through the game.

"I'm not sure it's a good business decision," Rubin says. Maybe in the future, but right now Call of Duty is having no trouble moving units at full retail. Free-to-play may be the wave of the future, but it's still a tremendously risky proposition.

Things Blow Up

Call of Duty: Ghosts will launch this November, and will be the first game since the original Modern Warfare to straddle two generations of video game hardware.

This presents new risks and new challenges, but EEDAR's Divnich tells me that the end is nowhere in sight for Call of Duty.

"The Shooter category is a multi-billion dollar a year category and is the largest genre in video games," he says. "There are many competitors looking to gain a piece of the pie. It would seem that Activision’s biggest risk is holding onto their brand equity as the industry shifts to a new generation of consoles, but we have little concerns over a potential dethronement."

Partly, this is due to the success Activision has had with all their major franchises recently. Even World of Warcraft, which has lost millions of subscribers over the past year, remains the number one subscription-based MMORPG in the world.

"Activision is a methodical company and take great care in protecting and expanding their brands," Divnich says. "The console transition always brings surprises and will certainly produce new blockbuster brands, while some existing brands may not survive the transition. With Call of Duty, however, this is one brand that is likely to remain a powerhouse for the at least the next decade."

Call of Duty: Ghosts is still a ways off, but the game is coming with its own suite of changes. The game is being built on a new engine and the team is developing it from the top down---using the highest resolution assets as the base and then scaling down from there, so that the next-gen version of Ghosts will look much better than current generation.

There will also be a bit of sneaking around in the game.

"From a mechanics standpoint I think one of the things we’re trying to do is actually a little more stealth," Rubin notes.

At E3 this June, some of the quieter moments from the game were revealed. Rubin says he was surprised with how positive the reception was. He thought everyone would want to see big explosions and lots of gunfire, but the slower pace seemed to strike a positive note.

Of course, things will still go boom---and in a bigger way than ever before.

The Infinity Ward team spent some time in the middle of the Arizona desert blowing things up and recording the results.

"We recorded everything from five pounds of black powder to 25 pounds of black powder," sound designer Dave Rowe told Polygon. "We recorded C4, we recorded ANFO, all kinds of different explosions — things that give different sounds based off of how the explosives actually work.

"Black powder's really slow, C4 is really sharp, so it's a real sharp crack. We can take bits and pieces from different microphones, different perspectives and use them in the sound design for all the grenades, flash bangs, any of the other big explosions that take place in the game, even some of the smaller ones can become sweeteners on specific weapons. A shotgun for instance."

All these sounds will be more realistic thanks to improvements made in the game engine that bring more dynamic audio to the game.

In the past, sound effects were built to order. In a cave, bullets would make a different sound than in an open field, but sounds were designed ahead of time to match whatever environment you were in. They were pre-packaged, basically.

"What it does now is the audio engine is mapping the environment you’re in and adjusting weapon sound appropriately," Rubin tells me.

It's doing this in real time, measuring the distance you are from the wall and what that wall is made out of, and so forth. So audio is reactive to every detail---dynamic rather than pre-determined.

A Crippled Giant

The game itself is a departure from the Modern Warfare storyline.

"When we finished MW3 and we felt very strongly that we had finished that story and that arc and we wanted to do something different," Rubin says. They still wanted to do a modern shooter. Rubin believes that the very fact that the game takes place in modern times rather than say, World War II, is one of the primary reasons it's so successful, though he does say he'd like to see the original Call of Duty remade using modern technology.

Ghosts won't take place in the same modern world players have come to expect. The fantasy goes much further this time around even if it's not the first time the series has tweaked our reality to make room for the game's fiction.

"We wanted to make this changed world,' Rubin tells me, "that isn’t something people understand or know, where the US is a crippled giant."

It's a cool idea, actually. Or maybe it just appeals to my imagination more than previous Modern Warfare games.

For one thing, it's always fun to speculate on a future in which the U.S. has lost its economic and military dominance. Maybe it's the kid in me that remembers watching Red Dawn back in the 80's.

If anything, while we've come to take for granted the U.S. as a world superpower, that dominance is something of an anomaly in the vast sea of human history.

We're the most powerful superpower the world has ever known, but we've only been in that position since World War II. So there's something intriguing about playing as the underdog rather than the world power.

Besides, rooting for the underdog is about as American as apple pie. And there's a dog in the game---a military-trained German Shepherd named Riley.

Of course, the single-player campaign isn't the main feature of any Call of Duty. It's an expensive, cinematic adventure that often serves as a warm-up for the main attraction: multiplayer.

That's the meat to the single-player campaign's potatoes, and Activision is planning the big multiplayer reveal tomorrow in Los Angeles.

Whether Call of Duty: Ghosts can maintain its place at the top of the video game charts remains to be seen, but there's no doubt that 2013 is going to be an interesting year, as two new video game consoles launch, and EA's Battlefield 4 aims to capture Activision's flag---something former EA CEO John Riccitiello believes will happen this year.

For his part, Rubin is excited for the competition.

Speaking with GamesIndustry International Rubin had nothing but praise for the new Battlefield, noting that competition can actually drive a developer to make a better game. From a developer standpoint, Rubin says it can be exciting to see how other games are shaping up.

"So from a developer's side, it definitely pushes us [to do better]" he told the publication. "But it pushes us in a---I don't know if other studios feel this way---but I hope in a sort of camaraderie type sense. 'Oh, those guys are doing awesome stuff. Let's jack up our game.' But not like two opposing teams. Rather, like the same team pushing in the same direction."

For two franchises built around competitiveness and constantly vying for dominance in the video game market, Rubin's philosophy might be surprising. But I suspect that he's on to something.

"We all want gaming, in general to be awesome," he says, "because if gaming isn't good, then we all lose our jobs in a sense. So for us, I think that the intellectual realization is we want everyone to be successful because if gaming is successful then we're all successful."